Soul Loss

by Amber Foxx

  Fiona slipped her hand into Jill’s. The shamanic teacher’s already erect posture stiffened. “No,” Fiona said. “I haven’t heard of any changes.”

  “Sorry. Of course you couldn’t. Just came up with it today. New name. Spirit World Fair. New process for participants.” None of it was actually decided yet, but it would be good news for Fiona. She’d pass any test. “Trying to up the quality—not that you’re not quality, of course, you are—but they’ll be forming a guild.” He looked at Jill. “Verifying competence.”

  Jill widened her eyes in a travesty of interest. Fiona dropped her gaze and sipped her wine. Her lips looked almost gray, she was so washed out. “I doubt I’d join.” Her voice held a subtle tremor. “I’m not doing the fair this year.”

  “Why not?” Idiot. She might be ill. What a blunder. He should have asked about her health after all, not started with the guild. “Sorry. You feeling all right?”

  Fiona started to speak, but was cut off when Jill gave her a strange one-finger caress, drawing a line down Fiona’s upper arm from her shoulder to her elbow. The controlling, possessive gesture repelled Jamie, making him want to yank Fiona away.

  The lead guitarist from the band swooped in and clapped Jamie on the back. “Jangarrai! Do a song with us?”

  “Yeah.” Jamie was grateful for the invitation. He needed to get away from this table. “ ‘Piece of my Heart?’ ”

  The guitarist gave him a thumbs-up. As Jamie rose, he turned toward Fiona. She looked like she’d lost a piece of her heart. Why wasn’t she doing the fair? Her eyes locked with his as if she wanted to say something, but she didn’t even try this time.

  She was like Ximena and Azure, under the same sad cloud. Like them she was qualified, easily verified, and yet she’d declined in the same miserable way. His great idea had crushed her, too.

  “Call me,” Jamie said as he backed away to join the band. She shook her head, her faded mouth pressed into an inverted curve. Jill squeezed her hand. Dahlia watched Jamie, no expression, her purple gaze as cold as the half-empty beer he’d left on the table.

  Jill got up to dance with Dahlia. The timing had to be intentional. It was the first time Jill had danced all night or Jamie would have seen her. He did the song with his eyes closed and left.

  When he got home, he craved a call to Mae. His fifth or sixth. Seeing her again had let loose a desire he’d penned up for months. He sat at the table eating blue corn chips and staring at her number. It was after midnight. Her phone would be off. I love hearing from you sugar, but unless I think you’re having a crisis, I’m turning the phone off at eleven. She’d said that after the third call of the day. At the time he’d thought nothing of it. Now he realized she’d known he would call in the middle of the night. He left a message and closed the near-empty bag of chips.

  Gasser patiently struggled to follow him up the stairs. The effort was touching, and hard to watch. Though Gasser needed the exercise, Jamie wanted to carry the poor thing. While brushing his teeth, he stood in the bathroom doorway to cheer the cat on. “Yeah, good job, mate. Good onya. You’re getting stronger.”

  Gasser persisted, step by heaving step. Jamie dodged back to the sink to rinse and spit, and came back out to lift his exhausted pet up the last three stairs.

  He placed Gasser on the bed, put his phone on the right upper corner of the mattress, and checked between the sheets and under the pillows for spiders and scorpions. All clear. He turned off the overhead light in the bedroom, leaving the hallway light on for comfort, and got into bed. Cuddling Gasser, he apologized for being too drunk to give him his usual bedtime Reiki. The cat passed wind audibly as he crept onto Jamie’s belly and began to tread like he was making a nest.

  Fern, the landlady, believed this habit of Gasser’s had saved Jamie’s life in January when he’d overdosed. Though he’d meant to go upstairs and lie in the bathtub in case he was a messy corpse, he’d started drinking to make sure the drugs worked and had passed out at the foot of the stairs. Gasser had walked on him, the twenty-pound cat punching his diaphragm, caterwauling at being ignored, until Fern couldn’t stand it and came over. She claimed Gasser had made Jamie breathe. Strange—but when it came to surviving, stranger things had happened.

  He slid the cat higher onto his chest. Too much pressure on his belly after all the beer and chips. Gasser spread over his owner’s heart, laid a paw against his cheek, and purred, his head so close to Jamie’s neck that he could feel the twin streams of air from Gasser’s nostrils.

  Sleep teased but refused to come. Jamie’s left hip ached from two days of hard dancing, his right shoulder was sore from lifting one of his smaller partners, and his little finger was numb and tingling. His soul was strained, too. The fight with Jill. Azure and Ximena’s sadness. Fiona’s troubling decline. A nagging, unwanted memory. Jill hovered over Lily-Dahlia the way she had hovered over Kandy, pretending to teach her.

  He hugged Gasser tighter and the cat squawked. Jamie apologized and held on more gently. The CD player downstairs started playing, a mezzo soprano’s collection of love songs, the last thing he’d been listening to earlier in the day. Bloody hell. He’d forgotten to send the spirits away.

  Despite the strangeness of its playing, the music eased his distress. He pictured little Roswell aliens the color of his car, hovering like winged cherubs. Codependents from outer space. Whoever the spirits were, perhaps they were trying to show they cared, sparing him the struggles of his nighttime heart. Lifting him up those last few steps.

  Chapter Eight

  Jamie’s phone woke him far too early. He hoped the call was from Mae. It would be worth the hungover awakening to hear her voice in his bed first thing in the morning. It was Kate calling, though, reminding him to do what he was going to anyway, call Azure and Ximena.

  During breakfast with extra-strong coffee, he made the appointment with Azure Skye on the pretense that he wanted to discuss Spirit World Fair marketing ideas. Ximena didn’t answer his calls. Neither did Fiona.

  Calling her reminded him to tell Harold and Naomi he’d seen Lily. He was grateful to reach only voice mail for each of them. They would have asked how she was. She’s a zombie. She’s changed her floral species. He let them know he’d seen her, that she was where they thought she was, doing what Naomi had wanted her to do, and left it at that. He couldn’t explain the state of her soul any more than he could comprehend what had happened to Fiona, Ximena, or Azure.

  Maybe he could get Azure to explain, if he could manage to ask without making her cry.

  Trying to clear his head with the ride, Jamie biked to a neighborhood of small adobe houses off Baca Street. Azure Skye’s house had a sky-blue garden gate, which struck Jamie as funny but aesthetically pleasing. Contrasting with the rounded adobe wall, it echoed the essence of the land, the red-brown rocks and the glorious bare sky. A bamboo wind chime clattered in her backyard so loudly he heard it as he went through the celestial gate.

  At the front door, he rang the bell, and Azure greeted him warmly. Cuddling a white rabbit in one arm, she didn’t seem sad today, but she might be trying hard. He knew how that act worked.

  “Lovely bunny,” he said, closing the door behind him.

  “This is Mr. Perkins.” She nuzzled the rabbit and spoke in a cute, high-pitched, pet-talking voice. “He’s my baby. Aren’t you, Mister Perky-poo?”

  Jamie felt vaguely embarrassed. He was attached to Gasser, but he didn’t think of his pet as a baby. Still cooing, Azure handed him the rabbit. Pink eyes. Not good to look at with a hangover. He pressed the rabbit briefly against his shoulder and stroked its back, then set it down. “Thanks for sharing him.”

  Then he noticed the mouth-watering cinnamon smell. It was like the cartoons where the steam of fresh-baked something-or-other hooked a character by the nose and wafted him to the source. She announced she’d made coffee and—especially for Jamie—vegan sticky buns, and led him to the kitchen. Every imaginable culinary gadget stood along the countertops like obedie
nt soldiers at the bountiful general’s command. Jamie’s envy mixed with self-reproach. I need to unpack. What’s the matter with me?

  Azure served, chatting with Jamie about their shared love of cooking, and then they moved to the living room. She settled on the couch. He took the matching white chair across from it and bit into the bun. Nothing but calories and air. Dangerous stuff. “Jesus. I’m glad I don’t make these.”

  Azure looked alarmed. “Is something wrong?”

  “Yeah, it’s too good. I’d be fatter than—sorry—mouth gets ahead of me.”

  “I’m not offended.” She nibbled her sweet, sipped her coffee, and set both aside. “It’s silly to think people can’t say the word fat around me. I’m fat.”

  Unlike the suggestion of verifying her psychic credentials, this subject didn’t bother her at all. “Not my favorite F-word,” Jamie said. “Still getting used to it.”

  “You’re not fat.”

  Compared to her he wasn’t. She must outweigh him by a hundred pounds. What if she was unhappy enough to get even bigger?

  “I appreciate your offer to help with whatever-we-call-it.” Jamie took another bite of the bun. “Spirit World Fair.”

  “I’m glad you asked me.” Azure sat forward, sipping her coffee again. “I love thinking of ways to market something. I could have been good in advertising. We need to make sure we mention the old name in the publicity, or keep it as a subtitle. It would help people recognize it.”

  “Yeah. Good idea. Hadn’t thought of that.” Of course not. He hated selling and advertising. She could probably give him a hundred great ideas, but he had to bend the conversation around to the guild and her reason for not participating. Stuck, he stayed with marketing and hoped some tactful detour would occur to him. “What else? Other ideas?”

  “I liked the two tiers, the guild and then the rest, but you need to make sure that when you publicize the guild, it doesn’t denigrate everyone who’s just having a lark.”

  “What—you mean you’re all right with fakes and quacks?”

  “Of course. We’d be lost without them. There aren’t enough good people to fill all the booths, and the fair would be a duller place without the less qualified people. People love that sort of entertainment, even when they don’t believe in it.”

  “So the guild is a fucking bran muffin, and the rest are a nice big fluffy sticky bun.”

  Azure smiled at his analogy, but then grew serious. “I think having a guild of verified, authentic healers and seers is important. A way to sort us out.”

  “But ... All right ... this is awkward ...” Jamie fidgeted, ate and drank. “Can’t think of a good way to put this. You and Ximena said you wouldn’t join, but you’re in favor of the guild and you’re all right with the ‘having a lark’ crowd, too. Dunno what to make of it. I mean—are you saying you’re fake?”

  She shook her head, her blonde waves and her triple chin swaying. Her rabbit hopped over to gnaw on her shoe. “No, Mr. Perkins.” Azure took a bite of her bun and nudged him with her free hand. “Not the shoes.”

  “What, then?” Jamie already knew from his father that Ximena wasn’t a fake. He knew from studying with Fiona that she was gifted. Kate’s and Azure’s lines of work were classic psychic fakery material, but Kate was all for assessment, so she had to be real, and as he’d expected, Azure denied being a pretender. Everyone should be reacting the way Kate was. “If you’re genuine, why won’t you do any of this? Are you sick? Something wrong in your family?”

  Azure drank coffee, looked at the rabbit. “No.”

  “Fuck. Is it me? Is it Kate? She piss you off?”

  “No. But I’d hate for her to know what’s happened. She’s got connections with everyone in our field. If the word got out, my reputation would be ruined.” The medium put her cup on the table and smoothed out her skirt. “If I tell you, can I trust you not to repeat it?”

  “Yeah. Of course, if it’s that bad.”

  “It is.” Azure glanced down, and then met Jamie’s eyes. “Ximena and I have lost our powers.”

  What she’d said didn’t seem possible. Jamie had worked hard to silence his strange gifts, and all he could do was control and diminish them, not make them go away. He ate, trying to slow his mind down, but ended up asking with his mouth full, “How in bloody hell do you lose your powers?” He swallowed. “I mean, maybe I’m stupid, but I thought, we—I mean, healers, psychics—don’t have powers, you just open up and let them through.”

  Azure studied him.

  “What?” he asked. “Did I get it wrong?”

  “Not entirely.” She chewed, drank coffee, and looked out the glass doors to a wind-shaken tree in her back yard. “But being able to open to other worlds or energies and let them in, that’s a power in and of itself.” Her blue eyes returned to him. “I reach out, I open myself, I do everything I’ve always done, and they don’t come.” Her voice broke. She set her food and drink down and her face crumpled. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry.” Jamie rushed to her side and wrapped his arms around her. She was as soft and warm as Gasser. “It’s all right. You can cry if you need to.” Azure trembled in his embrace and wept soundlessly. His throat tightened and his eyes burned. Other people’s crying always did that to him. “I fucking hate it when people tell you not to cry.” He imitated an inept would-be comforter, “ ‘Oh, please don’t cry.’ When you’re already bawling.”

  This made her laugh through her tears, and she stopped crying. She blew her nose, got up to get rid of the napkin, and came back beside him and patted his hand.

  “I normally live with spirits and talk to them. I always have, ever since I was a girl. I miss them.”

  “Jesus.” He couldn’t imagine missing having spirits barge in on him, but he could still relate. “That’d be like me losing my voice. Or not being able to play.” Both had happened, one after the other, and the losses, though temporary, had crushed him.

  “It’s not the end of the world.” Azure smiled reassuringly. “I’m writing a book on some of my more extraordinary encounters. I’ll have time to finish it now. And I have my church, and my son, and my friends. The living are still with me.” She sighed. “But I do miss the dead.”

  “You mean, they were actually around you that much?”

  “Yes, but it’s not just their company I miss, it’s helping them reach the people they leave behind. I was like a therapist for their relationships with the living. If you needed to heal things with someone who’d crossed over, I could bring that person around to talk with you.”

  Her words struck him in an emotional ambush. If you needed to heal things with someone who’d crossed over ... The encounter with Jill had forced Kandy’s memory out of hiding and up to the surface. He walked to the back door and shoved it open.

  Azure leaned forward with a worried look. “Jamie?”

  “Need a minute.”

  Closing the door behind him, he listened to the miserable bamboo clacker. He felt like he was choking on something. Turning his face to the wind, he let it whip his hair back and closed his eyes. He needed to forget Kandy again, put her back where he’d buried her for all these years.

  Azure opened the door and spoke gently. “I shouldn’t have brought that up. I didn’t know you were grieving.”

  Jamie took a deep breath and hugged himself, massaging his forearms. “Nah. It’s not that. Just needed some air.”

  “You don’t have to pretend you’re not sad.” She walked over and touched his shoulder. “I’m sorry I can’t facilitate a dialogue, but I can listen. Do you want to talk about this person you lost?”

  “Nah. Don’t like to talk about the dead.”

  “Sometimes they want us to. If they haven’t moved very far along, they can hear us.”

  “I’m all right now.” He forced a smile. “Let’s go back in.”

  Her face full of tender concern, Azure cuddled Mr. Perkins on the couch. Jamie returned to his chair and finished the coffee and the
bun. They didn’t sit well with his hangover, but he thanked her for them anyway, and for her time. He needed to wrap up before she started pushing him to talk about the dead again. “Kate thought I could convince you to do the fair if I apologized for saying you needed verification. What should I tell her?”

  “I’m not sure. Ximena was fine until I went to her for a healing and she couldn’t help me. She did a limpia and she couldn’t read anything in the egg. Nothing came through in her ceremony. And now, she can’t help anyone. We’re trying to keep this just between us. She’s telling her clients she needs some time off. I’m saying that I’m working on my book.”

  “But Kate’ll call you. If I don’t explain anything, she’ll ask.”

  Azure stroked her bunny’s ear. “I don’t want her to think I’m offended or that I’ve quit on her, but I don’t want the whole world knowing. I want my book to sell. It’s all that’s left of my work.”

  “No worries. If you let me tell her, we’ll keep your secret.” Another one to keep track of. “After all, we need you to stay famous in case you find a way to get your power back and do the fair.”

  Azure shook her head. “I already tried, remember?”

  “There are other healers. You must know who’s good.”

  “No. That’s not my social circle. Aside from Ximena, I’ve never gotten to know any of them.”

  He almost suggested Fiona, and stopped. The way she’d acted last night, she seemed to be in the same condition as Azure. But Fiona had trained other people. Wendy’s partner Andrea was newly minted as an energy healer, inexperienced but qualified. Santa Fe had no shortage of spiritual workers. If Azure wanted her problem kept secret from them, though, Mae could help when she came up. “I know someone I can recommend.”

  “Thank you, but I don’t think anyone should try yet. Not until we know how this happened. What if I’m like an electrocuted person still holding a live wire? What if I passed this on to Ximena? The person trying to help me will get hurt, too.”